Magnus Wenninger

[1] When Wenninger was thirteen, after graduating from the parochial school in Park Falls, Wisconsin, his parents saw an advertisement in the German newspaper Der Wanderer that would help to shape the rest of his life.

He was a student in a section of the prep school that functioned as a "minor seminary" – later moving on into St. John's where he studied philosophy and theology, which led into the priesthood.

Rather, a few chance happenings and seemingly minor decisions shaped a course for Wenninger that led to his groundbreaking studies.

[1] After completing his degree, Wenninger went to the school in the Bahamas, where he was asked by the headmaster to choose between teaching English or math.

At the suggestion of his headmaster, Wenninger attended the Columbia Teachers College in summer sessions over a four-year period in the late fifties.

This allowed Wenninger to build these difficult polyhedra with the exact measurements for lengths of the edges and shapes of the faces.

This project took Wenninger nearly ten years, and the book, Polyhedron Models, was published by the Cambridge University Press in 1971, largely due to the exceptional photographs taken locally in Nassau.

This led to the publication of his second book, Spherical Models in 1979, showing how regular and semiregular polyhedra can be used to build geodesic domes.